We’ve updated the end of this story with Visionary Realm’s investigatory conclusion; in short, it does not believe the dev was guilty but has chosen to “counsel” the GM about it and pause his in-game activity.
Right now there’s a small firestorm burning away in the Pantheon: Rise of the Fallen Discord, as one of the developers at Visionary Realms has been accused of cheating through the use of developer commands to help his in-game guild get an upper hand, and the studio is now investigating the situation.
The kerfuffle involves GM Ryzel aka Ulmo, who works for the studio as the technical director and stands accused by a former member of his guild of spawning in rare mobs for them to kill and loot. The accusations were first shared in a now-deleted Discord thread with initial explanations from Ulmo that claim he was “trolling” and that he was helping out “advanced testers,” according to one of the MMORPG’s community managers.
While the original thread was indeed removed, a second thread has been allowed to persist, which is where most of the discussion continues to fly: Some players are reading the initial response from devs to the report as a threat against the reporting player, others are arguing that none of this matters in an early access game, and others believe the behavior represents a conflict of interest. Meanwhile, the game’s community manager says Visionary Realms is still waiting on an undoctored screenshot of the event, and while the devs maintain that Ulmo was surely “goofing around,” they also say that the matter is being looked in to by higher-ups. Either way, the whole thing is in the “allegedly” bin right now as Visionary Realms investigates, but the company does seem to be taking it seriously.
Regular readers might remember that Pantheon is not the first MMORPG, early access or otherwise, to come under fire following accusations that devs used their access to empower themselves and their friends. The most famous example is surely EVE Online’s 2007 “T20 scandal” that ended in devs being disallowed from playing the game until that policy was removed years later.
As for the people who harassed us for covering this story, you’re wild. When an MMO studio says it’s investigating one of its devs for alleged misconduct, that’s news.
